Industry represented on Codex residue group

The Washington State tree fruit industry has a representative on the Codex Alimentarius Commission, an international organization that sets international food safety standards.

Dr. Wally Ewart

Codex was formed by two international organization, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Many countries around the world use the Codex standards as a basis for accepting imported produce, and most Southeast Asian countries defer at least in part to the Codex standards.
Codex has 24 committees, two of which directly affect the tree fruit industry: one on pesticide residues and another on food additives.
Dr. Wally Ewart, vice president for scientific affairs at the Northwest Horticultural Council, has been invited to join the Codex Committee on Pesticide Residues. He said the committee is largely composed of government bureaucrats and representatives of chemical manufacturers who register chemicals, and in the past, there has been very little input from producers. The U.S. delegation included only two commodity representatives, and they were both from the citrus industry.
"That's been changed in that there are only two members, but I'm one of the two," Ewart announced at the Washington Tree Fruit Postharvest Conference. While he felt this was a positive change for the tree fruit industry, he pointed out that this still leaves vegetable producers without a representative.
Ewart said the U.S. pear industry became acutely aware of the lack of commodity input when it found out that the Codex registration for the antioxidant ethoxyquin, which is used to control scald on pears, was in danger of being dropped.
Ethoxyquin is in the process of being reregistered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Elf-Atochem North America, Inc., which formulates ethoxyquin for use on pears, elected not to reregister the chemical because of its very small market. The pear industry in the Pacific Northwest has spent $1.5 million on the studies needed for its reregistration. The studies should be completed this fall, Ewart said.
Not having received any indication from Elf-Atochem that it intended to pursue reregistration of the chemical, Codex planned to drop its Codex registration.
Ewart said no one had stepped forward to inform the Codex committee that its reregistration was being supported. "We were not at the table to say we wanted this registration to be maintained," he said. "This shows you how we, in the Northwest, could be impacted by an international standard where we were not getting enough input."
To obtain a Codex registration for a material is a long process, Ewart said, and this is one of the weaknesses of the system. It is an eight-step process, which can take up to eight years and is very expensive. Unlike the EPA, Codex has no special registration process for minor-use chemicals. In the United States, minor chemicals that are not used on many crops are not subject to the same extensive studies as widely used chemicals. Ewart said he will be urging Codex to adopt a similar system. He was attending his first Codex meeting in The Hague, the Netherlands, in April.
Chris Schlect, president of the Hort Council, said Ewart's appointment to the Codex Committee is a significant step. "That's a heck of an appointment, and I think our industry should be proud that we have a representative in that delegation."